Still-life with gross tomato and heart
A friend is at a Vipassana Meditation (click the link for the rarely seen wagon wheel gif) where she’ll be silent for nine days. I spent the weekend with my phone on DND, writing things like this:
A callus forms across a heart throbbing like an overripe tomato, the blood forms a new hole, the callus covers it faster than a callus should. I tie the blue veins and red arteries into a double bowline so the swelling grows and grows. It’s my problem now.
It’s a book about fathers and sons and the crippling effects of empathy. I’ve got 80 handwritten pages that are either a pretty good spin on Adolfo Bioy Casares’s “The Invention of Morel", or future evidence that time alone should be meted out like pills to avoid things like this.
The funnest part of fiction is the first draft, particularly since I haven’t written fiction in at least 20 years. I’ve written a lot of poetry, but I’m trying to make a conscious effort to avoid the trappings of fiction-written-by-a-poet: short chapters; a guiding structure that allows plot to be put on pause for a few hundred words; use of the word elegy.
About 2/3 of the way through books of bad poetry there’s often a poem called “Elegy”, “An Elegy” or “Elegy: My Father’s Butthole” or whatever. I always picture the poet just at their wit’s end, shrugging, with a sigh loud enough for a yoga instructor to hear, saying, “I don’t know. Elegy, I guess?”
But then, books of poetry should not be judged like fiction. If I find a poem of soaring majesty or a verse of grounded understanding here and there, I’m probably going to give it 4.25 stars on StoryGraph, even if every poem should be called Elegy, because if you’re not dying, you’re not alive.
An elegy for self-respect
Sobriety’s been hard this week. Not so much the alcohol part, but the underlying thought processes, where I’m looping myself, still wondering why X didn’t text, wondering if there’s another Act in my story, wondering why it upset me so much when my son injured himself by launching himself at me in a prank attack, falling to the ground and banging his skull against the corner of a teak bench, even though it was just a shallow scrape.
I spend a lot of time alone, but I talk a lot, often into a digital recorder while driving, though I never listen to the recordings. I figure if I told it to the sky and I don’t remember a thing, it’s best left there. The recorder isn’t even specifically for fiction, poetry or Substack ideas. It’s 340 .wavs of to-do lists, ad hoc therapy and the occasional field recording of a train. I know there are some where I broke down crying, including one where I decided to record myself crying in the shower in big heaping sobs, pausing to step out the shower to track down the recorder. The recording worked great because I have no idea why I did that.
I did figure one thing out though. I wish I caught him.